EVERTH CABRERA

Age: 22

Born: Nandaime, Nicaragua

Ht./Wt.: 5-10, 176

Signed: As non-drafted free agent by Colorado on June 11, 2004

Pro career: Two seasons in Dominican Summer League; Rookie League at Casper in 2006; Singel-A Modesto and Single-A Tri City in 2007; Single-A Asheville in 2008; selected by Padres in first round of Rule V Draft on Dec. 11, 2008.

Highlights: Led all of professional baseball last season with 73 stolen bases (89 attempts). Named to South Atlantic League midseason and postseason All-Star teams. Played majority of games before this season at second base. Played just 42 games this season due to fractured hand but leads Padres with 11 steals (12 attempts) and four triples. The Padres didn't have anyone with more than four triples last season.

SAN DIEGO – He felt like he'd seen, well, Casper. The ghost and the town.

Nothing against the outpost that's located about as close to dead-center Wyoming as civilization gets, an area that certainly had great allure to the likes of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill and other legends of the Wild West. It just didn't have quite the same appeal to a teenager arriving from rural Nicaragua.

“Dificil,” says Everth Cabrera in his native language, recalling his first baseball assignment in the U.S. in 2006. “Muy dificil.”

Hard. Very hard.

“I was in Casper one day,” Cabrera says, “and all I wanted to do was go home.”

No wonder Cabrera simply smiles when someone asks him about the difficulty of this Snake River-like leap from Single-A ball in Asheville, N.C., to the leadoff and starting shortstop position with the Padres. He'll leave it to others to put it in perspective. Or try.

“Asheville to San Diego,” says Rich Dauer. “Unbelievable.”

Now in his first season as third-base coach of the Colorado Rockies, Dauer previously was the roving infield coordinator for that organization, which was loaded with so many promising shortstops and second basemen than it exposed Cabrera to the Rule V draft last winter. And lost him.

“There was no question he was our top defensive prospect as an infielder,” says Dauer. “We had other shortstops and we needed him at second, and he was so valuable at second, but he'd keep creeping over to shortstop (in drills). He wouldn't give up making us look at him over there. Next thing you know we're going, hey, this guy's a pretty stinking good shortstop.

“He was playing great at a tough place. Asheville's got well-manicured bumps. I've talked to managers he's had who say that with his arm and athleticism, Evvy could probably play center field as well as anybody.”

Baseball's not such a merciful game, but if the Padres ended their season today, Cabrera might be their most uplifting story of 2009. Twenty-two years old, yet playing his sixth summer of professional baseball, he seems to have appeared out of thin air to provide the Padres with play that's been steady and spectacular at the most vital of fielding positions.

“He reminds me so much of Omar (Vizquel),” says Padres coach Jim Lefebvre. “He has more range, more of an arm, more speed and he's more advanced physically than Omar was at his age. With that said, Omar became probably the greatest shortstop who ever played. This kid's a great find who could be around a long, long time.”

Cabrera's batting average (.259) and on-base percentage (.342) leave some room for improvement, and he's clearly a work in progress after just 42 big league games. In the opener of the Padres' current series at Cincinnati, Cabrera smoked a line drive left-handed for his first major league home run, then hit a triple right-handed with a bit of bravura on the basepaths. He added three hits Tuesday night, including a pair of doubles.

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The triple was Cabrera's fourth of the season, equaling the most by any Padres hitter all last year. His speed and fearlessness made Cabrera professional baseball's stolen-base leader in 2008. He's tops on the Padres with 13 thefts in 14 tries – and that's after missing no fewer than 60 games with a fractured hamate bone in his left hand suffered April 19.

“To be honest, I think what impressed me more about Everth than anything was how he acted when he broke his hand,” says veteran second baseman David Eckstein. “I mean, he's been great from the start. Making that jump from A ball, I don't know if he even knows what are the right questions to ask, but he's always listening and always watching and always trying to get better. But I just always think of that day he got hurt.

“He was sitting in front of his locker, crying. That told me a lot. Most young guys might've just thought, well, I'll be back in two months. He was devastated. That kind of dedication and passion's impressive.”

If only by birthplace, Cabrera is a rarity. Where he came from, too, might also help explain why he's moved to tears at the thought of having the game taken away from him.

The list of major league players from Nicaragua is a short one, Cabrera being just the 10th since 1976. A vast majority have been pitchers – most notably, Dennis Martinez, who could've been elected el presidente back home after throwing a perfect game for the Montreal Expos, and most recently Vicente Padilla – but the one countryman who resonated with Cabrera was outfielder/leadoff Marvin Benard with the San Francisco Giants (1995-2003).

Always about the littlest guy on the field – until he teamed with Eckstein – Cabrera grew up in Nandaime, about an hour away from the capital, Managua.

“There was much poverty, a suffering type of life, people doing whatever kind of work they could find,” says Cabrera through the translation of Mike Tompkins, the team video coordinator who's also of Nicaraguan descent. “When I started playing ball, it was in the street, and from the streets I'd go play sandlot. I had to get written permission from my mom to go play Little League with the older kids, because I was only 6.

“Before then, I played with a tennis ball. We all just used our hands. I'd ask my mom (Xiomara Membreño) for a glove. She did the impossible to get me one. I didn't know that she'd saved and saved and saved to get me a glove. One day when I was 7, she'd just left a glove by my bed. I used that glove until it broke, until it ripped open, a lot of years.”

Conversely, Cabrera became so adept with the mitt that eventually he was able to help support his mother, signing with the Rockies at the age of 17. Before he finally convinced Colorado to take a chance on him, Cabrera had gone to every tryout staged throughout Nicaragua, played in every winter-ball game he could.

He didn't have to fib about his age. Just his hitting.

“When the scouts ask me if I hit left-handed, I said yes, even though I never did,” says Cabrera. “I knew I had to learn because I was a small guy and small guys have to be switch-hitters. I went to the Dominican and worked on it. I'd take batting practice right-handed and left-handed, and I never hit the ball well left-handed.

“I told the scouts, 'Give me 50 at-bats left-handed.' The next day they told me, 'We're not giving you 50 at-bats. We're giving you the entire year.' ”

After two years with the Rockies entry in the Dominican Summer League, Cabrera reported to the Casper Ghosts (what else?) of the Pioneer League in 2006. Not happily, his first impressions stuck for quite awhile, especially when he found himself still batting .098 after more than a month.

“I told myself, 'If I keep batting like this in the next three (or) four games, I'm quitting,' ” says Cabrera. “I started getting better, better, better and my mentality changed.”

Cabrera began climbing steadily up the ranks and showing some offense – on-base percentages of .382 in Casper and .432 with the Tri-City Dust Devils of the Northwest League – but his progress was hampered by an ankle injury in '07.

The Rockies still thought of him primarily as a second baseman despite Cabrera's strong arm. Plus, many of the prospects Cabrera was competing with were draftees with sizable signing bonuses, not to mention more power at the plate.

He was clutch, though, at Asheville. In addition to the 73 stolen bases – proof enough that his ankle was healed – Cabrera batted .363 with runners on base, .361 with runners in scoring position and .455 with the bases loaded.

At best, Cabrera thought he might be destined for Double-A in 2009. Thanks to the Rule V and the Padres, he overshot his mark. By a lot.

Then again, with the departure of Khalil Greene via trade, San Diego was as hungry for a shortstop as Cabrera was for an opportunity to play shortstop. He showed up in Peoria with not only the Rule V label – meaning he'd be offered back to the Rockies if he failed to make the Padres roster – but also the skepticism that anyone could go from the Sally League to the National League.

“When I first got to spring training, sometimes I doubted the reason I was there,” says Cabrera. “What were the real odds of me making the team? But I said, 'They're not going to scare me from here.' Sometimes people are nervous because they're scared. I was never scared.

It was the sight of another Dodgers player that really brought things home to Cabrera. In his teens, Cabrera's unquestioned baseball idol was Rafael Furcal, whose baseball bio was eerily similar.

Built like Cabrera at 5-10, 165 pounds, Furcal was a cannon-armed infielder who'd convinced the Atlanta Braves to convert him from second base to shortstop, a speedster who made himself a switch-hitter and made the majors as a 20-year-old, jumping directly from A-ball.

And there he was, Furcal, batting leadoff for the Dodgers in a Cactus League game. The Padres had a rookie at short.

“Right away, he hit a ground ball to me,” says Cabrera, not adding that he made the play on Furcal or that he doubled in two runs in that March 29 exhibition. “I thought it was comical, a joke, that I could be on second base talking to Rafael Furcal.”